I recently purchased a new battery for my five-and-a-half year old laptop. This thing is starting to show its age, but it still runs XP just fine and dandy. The only problem I had been having was decreased battery life of about 45 minutes. So a quick visit to eBay got a new (non-OEM) battery delivered to my house for a rather reasonable $35.

After I received it, my initial impression was that the battery life was about 4-5 hours, similar to when the laptop was new. However, a day later, that dropped to about 1 hour, and then shortly after that, 30 minutes, at which point it was pretty much worthless.

I emailed the eBay seller for a refund but they offered to replace the battery as well as pay for return shipping of the broken battery so I gave it a try.

After receiving the 2nd battery I made sure to follow the proper battery conditioning instructions for a happy long-lasting battery. I followed the directions on this website http://www.laptop-battery.org/batterytips.html which seemed to work pretty well. So far the battery is working pretty well, and the laptop is chuggin' along. It seems to run my HD webcam pretty well, so I might end up bringing this laptop into the delivery room come June 12th.

By the way, in case you're wondering, the webcam will be for Skyping with people outside of Austin after the baby is born. It's NOT for live video streaming of the birth. Sick.